Conversion Tracking via JavaScript
By Steph Skardal
January 8, 2013
Most analytics conversion tracking is done these days with JavaScript or invisible pixel requests on the page that indicates a user has reached a conversion event, such as the receipt page. For example, Google Analytics conversion code might look like this on the receipt page:
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234', // transaction ID - required
'Womens Apparel', // affiliation or store name
'28.28', // total - required
'1.29', // tax
'15.00', // shipping
'San Jose', // city
'California', // state or province
'USA' // country
]);
_gaq.push(['_addItem',
'1234', // transaction ID - necessary to associate item with transaction
'DD44', // SKU/code - required
'T-Shirt', // product name
'Olive Medium', // category or variation
'11.99', // unit price - required
'1' // quantity - required
]);
_gaq.push(['_trackTrans' …analytics
Company Update January 2013
By Phineas Jensen
January 4, 2013
With the busy holiday season just behind us, we haven’t had as much time to write blog posts about what we’ve been doing in the past few months. So here’s an update on some of our latest projects:
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Brian Buchalter has been implementing new features for of a major release of Collaborative Software Initiative’s open source product, TriSano, which provides case and outbreak management, surveillance and analytics for global public health.
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Dave has worked on deepening our contacts with content providers and agencies using or interested in using the Liquid Galaxy platform. Recently back from Japan, Dave sold a Liquid Galaxy system to a research group in Kyoto.
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David has been working on an HA (highly available) PostgreSQL database system with automatic failover, dynamic node creation/population, and configuration synchronization.
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Greg Sabino Mullane has been speeding up slow queries, debugging pg_bouncer problems, expanding the abilities of Bucardo, and many other PostgreSQL-related activities.
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Jeff has been working on some major updates to the HydroPool site, including adding a set of “parts” products from an external supplier, with an interface that displays the schematic …
company
Paper Source: The Road to nginx Full Page Caching in Interchange
By Steph Skardal
January 3, 2013
Background & Motivation
During the recent holiday season, it became apparent that some efforts were needed to improve performance for Paper Source to minimize down-time and server sluggishness. Paper Source runs on Interchange and sells paper and stationery products, craft products, personalized invitations, and some great gifts! They also have over 40 physical stores which in addition to selling products, offer on-site workshops.
Over the holiday season, the website experienced a couple of instances where server load spiked causing extreme sluggishness for customers. Various parts of the site leverage Interchange’s timed-build tag, which creates static caches of parts of a page (equivalent to Rails’ and Django’s fragment caching). However, in all cases, Interchange is still being hit for the page request and often the pages perform repeated logic and database hits that opens an opportunity for optimization.
The Plan
The long-term plan for Paper Source is to move towards full page nginx caching, which will yield speedily served pages that do not require Interchange to be touched. However, there are several code and configuration hurdles that we have to get over first, …
interchange nginx performance
Oceanographic Museum of Monaco Liquid Galaxy
By Benjamin Goldstein
December 31, 2012
In December End Point installed a Liquid Galaxy at the spectacular and renowned Musée Océanographique de Monaco, which is breathtakingly situated on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. The system, donated by Google, will be officially presented on January 21st to H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco, who is the Honorary President of the Oceanographic Institute of which the museum is a major part.
End Point set up and configured the system. Our expertise was also called on by Google to create and adapt Google Earth Tours focused on the world’s oceans, including a tour about Ocean Acidification. In addition, End Point engineers developed a customized panoramic photo viewer for the remarkable Catlin Seaview Survey panoramas, which display and provide a baseline dataset for the earth’s coral reefs.
Many thanks are due to Jenifer Austin Foulkes, Google’s Ocean Program Manager, and to Jason Holt of Google for their work in supporting this project.
It is difficult to speak highly enough about the Musée Océanographique de Monaco. Prince Albert I of Monaco was an oceanographer himself and created the museum in 1901 with a vision of bringing art and ocean science …
visionport
Piggybak: End of Year Update
By Steph Skardal
December 27, 2012
Over the last few months, my coworkers and I have shared several updates on Piggybak progress (October 2012 Piggybak Roadmap , November 2012 Piggybak Roadmap Status Update). Piggybak is an open source, mountable as a Rails Engine, Ruby on Rails ecommerce platform developed and maintained by End Point. Here’s a brief background on Piggybak followed by an end of year update with some recent Piggybak news.
A Brief Background
Over the many years that End Point has been around, we’ve amassed a large amount of experience in working with various ecommerce frameworks, open source and proprietary. A large portion of End Point’s recent development work (we also offer database, hosting, and Liquid Galaxy support) has been with Interchange, a Perl-based open source ecommerce framework, and Spree, a Ruby on Rails based open sourced ecommerce framework. Things came together for Piggybak earlier this year when a new client project prompted the need for a more flexible and customizable Ruby on Rails ecommerce solution. Piggybak also leveraged earlier work that I did with light-weight Sinatra-based cart functionality.
Jump ahead a few months, and now Piggybak is a strong base for …
ecommerce piggybak rails
Find your Perl in Other Shells
By Mark Johnson
December 26, 2012
Often when programming, it turns out the best tools for the job are system tools, even in an excellent language like Perl. Perl makes this easy with a number of ways you can allocate work to the underlying system: backtick quotes, qx(), system(), exec(), and open(). Virtually anyone familiar with Perl is familiar with most or all of these ways of executing system commands.
What’s perhaps less familiar, and a bit more subtle, is what Perl really does when handing these off to the underlying system to execute. The docs for exec() tell us the following:
exec LIST
exec PROGRAM LIST
[snip]
If there is more than one argument in LIST, or if LIST is an
array with more than one value, calls execvp(3) with the
arguments in LIST. If there is only one scalar argument or an
array with one element in it, the argument is checked for shell
metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is
passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is
"/bin/sh -c" on Unix platforms, but varies on other platforms).
That last parenthetical is a key element when we “shell …
perl
Redirect from HTTP to HTTPS before basic auth
By Ron Phipps
December 22, 2012
While reviewing PCI scan results for a client I found an issue where the scanner had an issue with a private admin URL requesting basic http auth over HTTP. The admin portion of the site has its own authentication method and it is served completely over HTTPS. We have a second layer of protection with basic auth, but the issue is the username and password could be snooped on since it can be accessed via HTTP.
The initial research and attempts at fixing the problem did not work out as intended. Until I found this blog post on the subject. The blog laid out all of the ways that I had already tried and then a new solution was presented.
I followed the recommended hack which is to use SSLRequireSSL in a location matching the admin and a custom 403 ErrorDocument. This 403 ErrorDocument does a bit of munging of the URL and redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. The instructions in the blog did have one issue, in our environment I could not serve the 403 document from the admin, I had to have it in an area that could be accessed by HTTP and by the public. I’m not sure how it could work being served from a URL that requires ssl and is protected by basic auth. The reason that this hack …
apache audit hosting security
Announcing Ruby gem: email_verifier
By Kamil Ciemniewski
December 21, 2012
How many times have you tried to provide a really nice validation solution for our fields containing user emails? Most of the time, the best we can come up with is some long and incomprehensible regex we find on StackOverflow or somewhere else on the Internet.
But that’s really only a partial solution. As much as email format correctness is a tricky thing to get right using regular expressions, it doesn’t provide us with any assurance that user entered email address in reality exists.
But it does a great job at finding out some typos and misspellings… right?
Yes - but I’d argue that it doesn’t cover full range of that kind of data entry errors. The user could fill in ‘whatever’ and traditional validation through regexes would do a great job at finding out that it’s not really an email address. But what I’m concerned with here are all those situations when I fat finger kaml@endpoint.com instead of kamil@endpoint.com.
Some would argue at this point that it’s still recoverable since I can find out about the error on the next page in a submission workflow, but I don’t want to spend another something-minutes on going through …
ruby rails